The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
We're all about helping create a healthy, positive, and spiritually positive environment for church staff members and leadership teams.
The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
Silent Alarm: The Pain You Don't See on Resumes
Ministry staff are carrying unprecedented emotional weight from difficult experiences, and hiring churches must learn to address the pain behind every resume to build healthy teams.
• The last five to six years have been incredibly difficult for ministry staff
• Many candidates have experienced being ghosted, micromanaged, caught in power struggles, or laid off without warning
• Unprocessed pain turns into baggage that will show up in a candidate's next role
• Instead of just reviewing credentials, ask about how candidates have processed difficult experiences
• Important interview questions include asking about the hardest part of their last ministry season
• Look for awareness rather than perfection when evaluating candidates' responses
• Honest acknowledgment of pain that's been worked through indicates depth in leadership
Get your copy of "Silent Alarm: The Quiet Collapse of the Church Staff Pipeline" at chemistrystaffing.com/silentalarm to help your leadership team understand these critical hiring issues.
Have questions or comments? Send to podcast@chemistrystaffing.com
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Hey, welcome back to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name is Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom, and this is episode three in our Silent Alarm series 10 honest conversations between you and me about what's broken in the church staff pipeline and what we can do about it. Today's topic the part of the hiring process almost nobody talks about, and that's the pain under the surface. All right, you've seen the resume, you've read the bio, you've watched the video introduction and everything looks fine. But there's something missing, something that never quite makes it into a PDF or a resume, and it's the pain. And once you talk to the candidate you feel it right. Behind almost every candidate in today's ministry pipeline is some kind of a story of loss or burnout or grief or disillusionment, and if we ignore it, we risk hiring wounded people without making space for healing.
Speaker 1:Let me put this plainly the last five or six years has been an incredibly difficult time for ministry staff people. You know it because you probably lived through it. Ministry hurts and church staff are carrying more unseen emotional weight than ever before, and we see it every day. In our work at chemistry staffing, we regularly talk to candidates who've been ghosted by churches after really deep involvement, who've been micromanaged or manipulated by insecure leaders. Who've been caught in power struggles between boards and pastors. People who've been publicly criticized after internal church conflict. People who've been laid off without any warning after giving years to a role, people that have moved three times in six years, trying to find the right place and to find stability. Or maybe people that are simply just burned out from carrying too much for too long with too little support, and yet they still feel called, they still want to serve, they still hope that there's a church out there where they could be healthy. But they're coming to you and you're interviewing them, and they're coming to you with bruises, not bullet points, and if you don't ask the right questions, you'll never really see what's going on underneath. Here's your truth bomb for today. Every resume has a backstory and most of time it's more tender than impressive. And if you hire for skills and ignore the scars, you're going to hire pain and you'll be blindsided. You'll never, ever see it coming All right. So if you're on the hiring side at your church, this is going to matter more than ever. You're on the hiring side at your church. This is going to matter more than ever.
Speaker 1:It's tempting just to skim resumes for who they worked for, what size of church they came from, how clean their transitions look, but those are just some of the surface signals. Here's what you really need to start looking for, the things that you really need to start asking in your interviews how have they processed the hard stuff? Because there has been hard stuff. Every church, including yours, by the way has hard stuff. How have they processed that hard stuff in their previous world? What have they learned from their previous hurt? What does healing look like for them? Are they bitter? Are they angry? Have they been able to rebuild trust? How are they doing spiritually and physically and mentally? How have they handled seasons of invisibility or conflict or failure? Because here's the kicker Unprocessed pain turns into baggage and that baggage will absolutely show up in their next role when you hire them, when they're on your staff.
Speaker 1:If you don't know what you're dealing with and if they've not processed some of their pain, that will show up when you hire them. The pain that's not named or surrendered or worked through. That's called depth and we need to learn. We need more of that in church leadership. So here's some questions. I think maybe this will be helpful to you in hiring. Maybe they're questions you've never asked before, but if you're interviewing candidates, here are a few questions that could surface the invisible, the things that you won't find written on that one or two pages of their resume. Questions like what was the hardest part of your last season of ministry? What do you wish your previous leadership had understood about you? Again, these are just open-ended questions that will open up and you'll be able to see kind of what this person has been through. How do you feel like God's still healing you? What will you need to be aware? What will we need to be aware of if you join our team and here's a hint You're not looking for perfection, you're looking for awareness, right, honest awareness, because that's what makes the difference.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're talking about what I'm calling the asylumylum Alarm, the Quiet Collapse of the Church Staff Pipeline, and it's from my brand new book. I'm proud of it and I hope you get a copy of it. If you're trying to build a healthy team, I really think this is going to be something that's going to help every member on your search team, every member of your leadership team, work through just the changes that I've seen as being in my role as a co-founder at a church staffing agency. We're doing about 75 searches right now with churches all across the country and what's the old saying, we know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two. We get to see a lot of the trends that individual churches if you're hiring one or two times a year, you might not get to see. That's why I wrote this book and I think you'll find it very interesting. You can grab your copy now at chemistrystaffingcom. Slash silent alarm. Chemistrystaffingcom. Slash silent alarm. Go grab a copy.
Speaker 1:This is episode three. We've got 10 episodes in this series. You can order it on Amazon, probably have it in your hands tomorrow and kind of follow through as we do this podcast series together. All right, tomorrow we're going to be busting one of the most damaging myths in church hiring that if you can just find the perfect person, that unicorn, that everything will work out, and we're going to talk about why that mindset is failing you and how to reset your expectations before it's too late. So I hope you'll join me tomorrow for episode four, the Myth of the Just Find the Unicorn. We talked about this last week on the podcast as well, but I'm looking forward to unpacking more of the book with you tomorrow and, as always, you can reach out to me anytime. Podcast at chemistrystaffcom. Love to hear from you.
